Deeply researched and engrossing, this masterful series opener leaves readers hanging—Rats!—so they’ll eagerly await the...
With her first full-length novel in 10 years, an award-winning British crime writer launches a series about the Black Death.
In the summer of 1348, Sir Richard of Develish journeys to Bradmayne on business. While he’s away, news reaches Develish of a deadly pestilence. His wife, Lady Anne, brings her serfs within the moat of her manor house and then wisely refuses her husband’s re-entry, fearing he will bring the disease with him. She’s a woman ahead of her time, dismissing as superstition the idea of “a plague sent by God.” Years before, she’d had sewage pits dug well downwind of Develish; other villages didn’t dig any at all. Anne’s compassion for her serfs contrasts sharply with the attitude of her 14-year-old daughter, Eleanor, who hates everyone but her father and likes having serfs whipped. The living conditions in Bradmayne are vile; one might think “Men urinated where they stood” would say it all about a village, but the author spares no detail in showing what grossness causes stench and attracts vermin. People seem not to connect these godawful conditions with the “killing sickness in the village” that carries “a deadly pestilence with putrid boils” and requires the digging of mass graves. Before he succumbs, Sir Richard observes that “In twelve days, the world had changed beyond all recognition.” Yet no one knows how extensive that changed world is. Lady Anne has the serf Thaddeus Thurkell lead a small band of brave serfs to learn how other villages have fared. She is the central figure in this compelling saga in which people are either all virtuous and wise or all the opposite. While the serf Gyles Startout is a man of “courage and generosity,” Lady Eleanor opines how sweet it would be if he dies. As the plague continues at book’s end, Lady Anne still faces a dangerous enemy in her daughter.
Deeply researched and engrossing, this masterful series opener leaves readers hanging—Rats!—so they’ll eagerly await the sequel.Pub Date: Aug. 7, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-7783-6931-8
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Harlequin MIRA
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2018
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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